You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary.

via | reddit

A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal and/or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest and/or most easilly navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of [...]

Tags: Complex Systems, Design, Flows, Locality, Self-Organization, Swarm / Flock / Crowd

Another ladder of participation, but this time it is for Businesses based on Participation, and comes from Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation).

Consumption: Consumer -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
Self Service: Consumer -> choice -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
DIY Do it yourself: Consumer -> degree of involvement in the [...]

Tags: Business/Service, Participation

Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate, of knowledge. I store my knowledge in my friends is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people.

Karen Stephenson
cit. in Community Management. Processi informali, social networking e tecnologie Web 2.0 [...]

Tags: Collaborative Networks, Collective Intelligence, Knowledge

Since some months, I’m working on a small book in my spare time. It will contain the synthesis of my thesis in a book form and in three languages (English, Italian and Spanish), and I will release it with a Creative Commons licence on this website, on my Scribd page and on lulu.com where you [...]

“User-driven innovation: when the user makes the difference”

The report is the result of an extensive pilot-project with an aim of clarifying the awareness and use of user-driven innovation in the Nordic countries.
[...]
This report is written, during the spring of 2007, by a group of students from the Norwegian University of Science And Technology (NTNU) in [...]

Tags: Business/Service, Co-Creation, Economy, Innovation

City Hacking #02: Design Pubblico (by esterni)

Barefootpaths

In cities that are no longer communities, where estranged citizens go through the same paths every day and hardly ever get closer, design pubblico promotes another way of living collective places together, a conception of “public space” as opposed to the preeminence of “private time”; first-hand visions instead [...]

Tags: City, Design, Locality, Strategic Design

City Hacking #01: Urban Cup Holder

The aim of the urban cup holder is to encourage people to reinterpret street settings and claim them as their territory, instead of just using them as a means of passage from A to B. The cup holder is easily clamped with one hand to posts in the street, then [...]

Tags: City, Locality, Product Design